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Plastic wears down into fragments small enough to swallow without noticing. They are in tap water, in seafood, in salt, in household dust. Most passes straight through, and the question is whether it does anything on the way. The bacteria in the gut are the obvious place to look: there are a great many of them, they shift within days of a change in diet, and they can be sequenced from a single pellet of faeces. The studies asking this are almost all done in mice and rats, and they disagree. Some report a fall in the variety of species present, some a rise, some none. Working out why is hard, because almost nothing is held constant: the polymer differs, the particle size runs from nanometres to micrometres, the dose and the number of weeks differ, the strain of animal differs, and the number each study reports to summarise variety is not always the same one. This review gathers those experiments and groups them by the exposure itself, then asks what can be said once studies with the same exposure are read together. The output is a map of what has been tested and what has not.
Read up on microplastic exposure and on how gut bacteria are counted. Take one group of animal experiments, read them, build the table that goes with them, and write that section of the review.
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